You see, it would have been simple for you to take the easy way out and go to the zoned school around the corner, but for people like us who seek a little more and strive for new experiences, we are troopers. Daily commute to and from school isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
Some of the biggest life choices you made didn’t even relate to school, did they? Not even that one time you stayed up till three a.m. thinking you could finish all three exhibitions in one night. Coming to this school was by far your most life-changing decision. Then the next thing was deciding whether to take the train or the bus to school, whether you wanted to measure the exact probability of catching the B84 bus so you could be dropped in front of the school and be on time, or take the ten-minute walk from the B6 bus and have enough time to get a snack from the deli. It was these kinds of decisions that shaped how you managed your time and took care of yourself. All those mornings in eleventh grade when you came in late to AP U.S. History because you wanted to go to the store and get breakfast. How you casually walked in, plastic bag in hand as Michael Brady stopped in the middle of his lesson to give you the shadiest side-eye. I laugh now but you were only surviving the unknown.
Do you remember the days you would break down because of the immense pressure to be this perfect student in an unpredictable grading system? You felt like everything was swirling around and fusing together like honey stirred into warm tea, and it was too much for you. I didn’t know where all of those uncertain days would take us. And I never realized what the little everyday impacts would turn us into. Because back in ninth grade we wanted to see this unpredictable new side of Brooklyn we were never exposed to, not realizing the consequence of the long commute. Ninth grade we would be disappointed because it felt like mom was dissatisfied with our choice, but tenth and eleventh grade was only the molding of our own determination we have now.
You would think with the grades that we achieved throughout our adolescence that we could have gone to any high school and be any person we wanted to be. But we chose to take a blind step in faith and to test what we could achieve. And look where it has brought us! The relationships we’ve made over the years have influenced our growth and perception of the world and the rest of Brooklyn. If you had never left the bubble four years ago, you would still be ignorant to the world of drugs and gangs that never seemed real through the TV.
And yet all I can think about is getting on the bus for the final time. The last day where I’ll use my free MetroCard to take the trip home. Looking out the window, I’ll see the projects, then Pennsylvania and Rockaway then South Shore and Utica. Four years of passing by those same stops and wondering what our life would be like if we never went to our school. You have always reminded me to never close myself to what I can see in this world. To never question the power I have within my own self to determine my life. Thank you for never dying out. For always burning bright even when I regretted my choices because I felt like they were never safe. Life will never be safe. And when in doubt, always remember the forty-five-minute commute to our school, and how it could have easily been the zoned school around the corner.
Arrival
LYNDSEY REESE
I was inspired by Janiah’s beautiful lyric essay about the merging of her past and future selves.
You arrived like a heat stroke in June.
You remember accepting the offer, phone pressed to your ear as you leaned against a railing in Union Square, the park where you once cried, just across the street from the CVS, where you bought cheap eyeliner to hide evidence of your crying.
You left the job that made the park your refuge, and you will leave the one you have now, the one you accepted so many years ago on that warm and cogent day. You’ll leave with a set of new skills, the spider plants Brooke gave you, and the love of a man you met in a meeting. You’ll come home to his love, to your fevered and determined drive. Perhaps it will be June again, your season of departure, your season to arrive.
ALANTA THOMAS
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Hillcrest High School
BORN: Brooklyn, NY
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Haley buys me hot chocolate. I’m not a chocolate lover, but I do love her, so I’m officially a hot chocolate drinker. We write, we laugh, and we talk. We even went ice-skating. I wouldn’t want to have a chest full of anxiety on the ice with anyone else. Going to workshops and hanging out with Haley showed me that I’m not the only one who sits and stares at a piece for hours not knowing what to do with it, while also having faith that one day it will soar. Girls Write Now—life-changer.
HALEY SWANSON
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Assistant Editor, HarperCollins Publishers
BORN: Los Angeles, CA
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Published in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, The Millions
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: One October afternoon, Alanta and I carved pumpkins on a stoop in Brooklyn. Neither of us understood the carving book I bought us at Duane Reade, but we went up to our elbows in squash anyway. People slowed on the sidewalk to watch as we, laughing, hurled handfuls of pumpkin guts and seeds into metal mixing bowls. We talked about our families, her poems, my essays, how daunting life seems—but not in that moment. Darkness fell as we lit the finished jack-o’-lanterns. Watching the tea lights flicker in the night, it felt like something was beginning—and it was.
Color Me Gentle//False Healing
ALANTA THOMAS
“Love should be loud and bold, within graceful arm’s length.”
Color me gentle
Fill in all my blank spaces
Use your colorful emotions and shower me
Use the color red to represent your love
And fill me up
Use a color of your choice
To represent the way you feed my mind
With knowledge and confidence in my future
Endeavors
Color me gentle
Color me forever
—alanta
I thought you were the key to healing
You wrapped my wounds
You stitched my lacerations
You sheltered me
You hid me from the world to keep me safe
You hid me so I wouldn’t see
See what love really was
The wounds you wrapped I retrieved from you
The lacerations were cut deep at the hands of you
You feed me fear and torment
But at the end of the night, I still let you back in
—alanta
I Want Some More
HALEY SWANSON
Alanta and I often met at a diner—making waiter friends, sampling the six-page menu, playing booth-and-table musical chairs. It became our female family table, our place to discuss writing, school, work—and to eat.
My work wife sends me a picture of an Elevation Burger from its namesake restaurant in Plainview, New York. It’s beautiful, she says. I agree.
Later that week I take her to Shake Shack because she’s never been. She waits with me in line but doesn’t want to eat. At the last second, she looks at me—eyes wide, one blink—and says, If you get the fries, I’ll get the burgers.
My favorite college professor gave me a book for graduation, the title lettered in red foil down the spine—Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp. I never read it, but it’s what I think of when my friend asks for fries: what we want; what we fill ourselves with; why, when we’re not satiated, we hesitate to ask for more.
My first partner always ordered a fried egg on his burgers; my current one orders his over easy. I never ask for an egg. But there’s a diner on Hudson Street where the server knows my order by heart, meaning she knows me more intimately than if she actually knew me. I walk in and she says, Deluxe cheeseburger with a side of tzatziki, right, baby?
I’ve worked all day, and I’m hung
ry, so I say yes.
HANNAH THOMAS
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Edward R. Murrow High School
BORN: Arima, Trinidad and Tobago
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Stephanie has helped me improve my writing and pushed me to pursue genres I hadn’t tried before. One memorable experience we had was writing a memoir about my childhood stuffed animal. That piece of writing not only helped me academically but exposed me to a part of myself I hadn’t considered before. Through the process of writing the memoir, she helped me to a realization about my Pooh, understanding that it was more psychological than I’d figured. As a whole, my mentor has helped me understand my writing capabilities.
STEPHANIE GOLDEN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 5
OCCUPATION: Freelance writer
BORN: Brooklyn, NY
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Published on Aeon.co and Medium.com
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Hannah and I have a lot of fun at our sessions, largely due to the way our minds spark off each other, generating ideas and solving problems. A great deal of writing gets done, much of it as a result of this brainstorming. I love that Hannah is so open, willing to try anything and follow her writing process into exploring thoughts and feelings she sometimes wasn’t fully aware of.
My Pooh Is My Best Friend
HANNAH THOMAS
The idea for this piece came from an exercise we did one meeting. We wrote about a childhood object or memory that was important to us.
One Saturday, I went out with a group of friends to a restaurant. I took my Pooh out of my bag and put it on the table. “What’s that?” asked one of the girls. “It’s my Pooh,” I told her. She replied, “Like your security blanket?”
My Pooh has a Winnie-the-Pooh head, attached to a soft twelve-inch-square blanket that’s fleece on one side and satin on the other. I take it with me everywhere I go.
My Pooh means safety and warmth. It reminds me of being home, where I feel safest. It’s my biggest source of comfort. I wasn’t aware of my obsession with my Pooh until I was about seven years old and my mother explained to me that I had not let go of it since the day I was born, when they gave it to me in the hospital. Over time I collected many Poohs, and once people started to ask about them, I began to wonder why they were so special to me.
Each one had a unique story that I will never forget. When I was around nine, I had two Poohs, and my mother threw both of them away to try and break me of the habit. I threw a fit, and she bought me a new one to replace them. I lost another in the airport on a trip to Trinidad, and my seamstress aunt made me a new one.
I remember my mother cutting the bottom off her best satin curtain and giving it to me as a temporary substitute, because after she washed one of my Poohs the texture wasn’t the same. The unraveling threads had become rips and the satin was harsh, but that curtain had the right feel. My mother always tells me I will never find a new one to satisfy me because that feeling comes only with time. Which is probably why I always seem to gravitate toward the one I’ve had the longest.
Over the years I’ve collected almost one hundred Poohs. Half of them are at my house, and the other half are at my grandma’s house. I only keep one close to me at a time. After I’ve used one for a while it doesn’t give me the same feeling. I remember lying on the bed one day, realizing that the Pooh I had close to me no longer gave me the cozy feeling I was looking for. I looked up at the top of my closet where all my Poohs were, saw another one, and picked it up. It felt snug and warm so it became my new Pooh.
Now I am in high school, and my relationship with the Pooh hasn’t changed. My teachers have gotten so used to it that when they don’t see it they ask, “Where’s your Pooh?” And I say, “It’s in my bag” or “I forgot it today.” Without it I feel anxious and not focused. If I were taking a test, I would do just as well without it, but I would be in a bad mood.
I came across an article in The New York Times by a man who still loved stuffed animals. My first reaction was, “Wow! He gets it!” He sees his stuffed animals as having different qualities and roles. For example, “Sloth is wise and handsome; Patricia the Couch Pigtato who has a job writing TV criticism …” I could relate to that quote because he describes how he sees his toys not as stuffed animals but as friends. I also treat my Poohs like my best friends. I can picture them with different personalities, and I am closer to some of them than the rest.
I thought maybe my mother would have some insight into my relationship with my Pooh, so I decided to interview her. She told me, “I like that you feel a sense of security. But I wish you would wash it more often. At one point I really thought you would give it up but now I don’t mind, I like that you have that relationship. I can see the ease and comfort that you get from it, almost like a friendship.” I asked her if she could see me still being so attached to my Pooh in the future. “I think so,” she said. “I don’t know how attached you’ll be to it as you get older, but I know that now if you have any emotional turmoil or something like that it seems to bring you some sort of relief. I think it’s a healthy thing.”
Hearing both my mother’s and my friend’s comments made me realize that I had never thought of my Pooh as security. Now, in the process of writing this essay, I realized that both of them were right. As I grow and mature, I hope to not be so attached to it, and not need it with me everywhere I go.
Horse-Crazy
STEPHANIE GOLDEN
This piece began as an exercise Hannah and I did at a pair session. The prompt was to write about an important childhood object or memory. For me that evoked thoughts about girls and power.
From childhood through high school I was—like so many girls—horse-crazy. I longed for a horse of my own but lived in the suburbs, so had to settle for occasional rides at a stable. As a teenager, I went to summer camps featuring horseback riding, culminating gloriously in two months at a ranch camp near Pike’s Peak with other equally horse-obsessed kids.
Meanwhile I read the famous horse novels (Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka, Misty of Chincoteague, The Black Stallion) and horse nonfiction, watched the Triple Crown live on TV every year, and learned to draw horses from books. I wouldn’t leave the house on Saturday mornings before Fury, my favorite horse TV show, was over. Every March I sold fewer boxes of Girl Scout cookies than anyone else, because the others got out early and saturated the neighborhood. I didn’t care.
I last rode a horse in my twenties on a visit to a friend in Vancouver who drove us north into British Columbia, where she found a grizzled rancher who let two perfect strangers take a couple of his horses out into the wooded hills for as long as we liked. For an easterner trained in the strict formality of riding stables, it was like being dropped into paradise.
So it’s been a long time—and I realize that this great passion is now gone. What happened?
The boys at the ranch used to make sniggering comments about girls riding in western saddles that mystified me at the time. Today I find their notion that you could lose your virginity on the saddle horn purely ridiculous. Yet there’s an underlying truth in their unease at the idea of a girl with all that horsepower between her legs. Girls weren’t supposed to have the kind of power that moves through the world so fast and sure. For a 1960s middle-class girl whose ambitions were squished within the scope delineated by the man she would marry, galloping down a hillside on a sturdy western pony created a rush she might not understand—but she loved it.
Fortunately for me, the women’s movement triggered an epiphany: I didn’t need a horse, or a man, to generate that sense of strength and self-direction. When I became a writer and tasted the power of creating out of my own self an entire book that never existed before—362 typeset pages of my words—the horse lost its fascination.
KENIA TORRES
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: B
enjamin N. Cardozo High School
BORN: Queens, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Hannah has influenced my writing in so many ways. She has helped expand my imagination and helped me think outside the box with the writing prompts that we do in the beginning of our weekly sessions. Whenever she shares her work with me, I am always amazed by the casual and yet detailed and vivid description that she gives to her characters, which makes the story feel so real and full of life. Her stories also flow so perfectly and effortlessly, which is not always easy to achieve, and therefore I greatly admire and look up to her.
HANNAH SHELDON-DEAN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Freelance Writer and Writing Consultant, Columbia University School of Social Work
BORN: Burlington, VT
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Three recent children’s activity books published by Penguin Young Readers
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: I admire so many things about Kenia, but I think the thing I admire most is the sheer expansiveness of her imagination. Whenever we sit down to write responses to a prompt, I’m always astonished by how completely—and casually!—she conjures entire fictional landscapes out of nothing. Time runs differently, natural laws change, societies crumble and reform. Kenia doesn’t just write stories; she writes worlds. I can’t wait to see how Kenia will rewrite our own real world, and she reminds me every week that I can always think bigger and wilder.
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